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Peak Performance Resources for Leaders by Leaders

Tag: Personal Leadership Page 3 of 7

Your Inner-Critic

Have you ever made a mistake and felt the sting of dread, shame, and disapproval a split-second later, followed by a critical inner voice that judged and found fault with what you had done?

Both the feeling and the voice are manifestations of what is known as your “Inner Critic.” This article explores what is an Inner Critic, how it works, where it came from, and how to free oneself once and for all of this sabotaging mechanism.

Let’s explore the definition in more detail:

INNER:

  1. Situated inside, further in, or internal.
  2. Spiritual, mental, or emotional.
  3. Private and not expressed or discernible.

CRITIC:

  1. A person who disapproves and expresses their unfavorable view of something.
  2. A person who judges and evaluates or analyzes literary or artistic works, dramatic or musical performances.
  3. A person who tends too readily to make trivial, or harsh judgments; faultfinder.

INNER-CRITIC:

  1. Internal, private voice that disapproves, judges, evaluates, and finds fault saying that he or she is bad, wrong, inadequate, worthless, guilty, and not good enough.

If you are like most people, your feelings about criticism range from mild dislike to strong dislike to outright hatred of both the criticism and the person giving it.

What Are Emotions?

In this article, you will discover the language of
emotion, where they come from and why
emotion drives everything.

Love, anger, hate, fear. These are examples of emotions. Most people spend their time chasing emotions they want and avoiding emotions they don’t want. The trouble with living this way is that the emotions you are chasing seem to run away faster than you can catch them – and the emotions you are avoiding (or running from) seem to follow you wherever you go!

ZONE TIPS > Cause & Effect

One of the key components to getting into “The Zone” and staying there is understanding and mastering Cause & Effect.

There is a lot to this subject and it is a bit technical. However, master this and you are sure to experience a transformation in your results!

What is Cause & Effect?  Everything that happens is an Effect that was Caused by something. Nothing occurs without something else Causing it to happen.  For example, a glass that was sitting on the table does not fall onto the floor by itself.  A person walking by may bump the table, Causing the glass to fall off the table, onto the floor, and breaking into pieces.

ZONE TIPS > Staying “In The Zone”

Most people know what “The Zone” is and have experienced moments in The Zone in their career, sports, money, etc. Typically these moments are infrequent and unpredictable at best, and most people have no idea how to get in The Zone whenever and wherever they choose.

The Zone feels like a quiet excitement with intensified focus. You feel a sense of confidence, total concentration, and an intense awareness. Your movements are easy, flowing and especially coordinated. You lose all sense of time as if another dimension has been added. You are completely focused on what you are doing and all other thoughts and feelings diminish.

Towers of Glass, Feet of Clay: What Is the Quest?

I was going throughdubaipaster my travel photographs and saw this picture of a poster at the Dubai Airport advertising the world’s tallest building, which was under construction at the time. The Burj Dubai is very impressive and I was inspired to write more about the towers of glass.

Towers of Glass, Feet of Clay

royal_bank_building-smallI have been reflecting further about the “financial crisis,” and recalling a book I read in 1982 called Towers of Gold: Feet of Clay – the Canadian Banks, by Walter Stewart.

In a conversation about this with my colleagues I happened to say towers of glass, and perhaps 27 years later, Glass is more descriptive. In 1982, I was working in the oil and gas industry in Canada and this book was written about the Banking Industry, the mortgage crisis and the oil prices. These themes are again relevant in 2009.

Stress Reduces Quality of Life And Performance

With the pace of change accelerating at ever increasing rates, the world is becoming more and more stressful. How we cope with change and the resultant stress has a huge impact on our quality of life and our work performance.

Executive burnout is a direct result of an inability to cope and is a major cause of lost productivity, as is employee absenteeism and medical leave. Many high-performance people focus on one or two primary areas of life and neglect the other areas. This leads to imbalance, stress and unhappiness. Eventually, stress in one primary area of life will impact our performance in all areas.

Think about it… how can you be wired up in one area and not have this “creep” into other areas?

What would happen if our lives were optimized in all areas and fully integrated? What would happen to our quality of life and our performance?

Fragmentation Leads to Stress

Futurists commonly predict that we are moving away from separate personal and professional lives towards a life where our personal and professional lives are fully integrated.

For many of us, our lives have developed as fragmented sections or compartments. We are one way at work, and altogether different in our personal life. This leads to a split personality: the work persona and the home persona and never the twain shall meet. Our feelings get left at home, and the very fabric of what makes us human gets left out of the workplace.

Denial

Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person who is faced with a fact, feeling, situation or reality that is uncomfortable or painful to accept, repeatedly rejects it, despite overwhelming evidence.

Three different types of Denial are as follows:

  1. “Basic Denial” is when the person outright denies the reality of an unpleasant fact, feeling, situation or reality.
  2. “Minimization” is when a person admits the fact, but denies how serious it is.
  3. “Transference” is when a person admits the facts and seriousness, but denies any responsibility and transfers responsibility to someone else.

Lack of Love

Lack of love as a child leads to feelings of inadequacy.  This leads to sensitivity to rejection as an adult.

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